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Shadows On The Grave #7

Shadows On The Grave #7
Released by: Dark Horse Comics
Released on: August 9th, 2017.
Written & Illustrated by: Richard CorbenPurchase From Amazon

Richard Corben’s Shadows On The Grave continues, this seventh issue once again opening with a one pager featuring Mag The Hag. This time she tells us the story of The Prisoner, where Wilfred and his younger sister Pearl.

From there, the first proper story shows up in the form of Legacy Of Hate! It’s the tale of an old man named Joshua Bullard, unhappy with his butler Heywood for bringing his nephews Andrew and Victor into his room. They know the old man is not long for this world and the two younger men are running out of money. They wanted an advance on their inheritance, what they got was kicked out of the old man’s mansion. A week later, Joshua is dead and the nephews are left nothing in his will. Before they could talk to a lawyer, the old man’s uninsured mansion burned to the ground. Months later, Andrew and Victor are penniless, in debt to their landlord and their bookie, and then they get an unexpected visit from Heywood who claims to know where Bullard’s fortunes were buried and how to get them.

In Digger we meet Jed Aukman, a simple gravedigger who gets a visit from his cousin and boss, Dr. Hardell Benrik. He’s an abusive jerk, upset that Jed buried the expensive coffin instead of switching the body out and burying the cheap one as he was instructed. We learn that Jed wasn’t always so meek, it changed when Hardell’s wife Agnes died, and that Hardell intends to check in on Jed later that night to make sure the coffins got switched after all. When he checks in on the shake where Jed lives her hears the man talking to someone, a woman…

Up next, it’s Roadside Horror Museum, in which a motorist named Carl picks up a woman named Doreen after she had some car trouble. They see a sign for a horror museum up ahead and decide to pay the $0.25 to check it out. They arrive at the rundown building and are greeted by Madame Mauve who gladly takes their money and then show them around. Doreen is freaked out but Carl insists everything here is a fake and insists that they leave despite Doreen’s protests. When they meet one of the displays from the museum in the middle of the road on their way out, however, Carl wonders if they should get the cops involved – but of course, there’s more to this than he realizes.

Last but not least, the latest installment of the Denaeus story, this latest chapter entitled Crushed. Prince Moronicles is now the king, his father killed by his own archers last issue, a trap set by Denaeus himself with some help from lovely Lustea and the witch Gamiola. Moronicles wants revenge, and with warriors in tow has travelled north to find those who killed his family. They track them, showing no mercy to anyone they suspect of harboring them, but Moronicles insists that the guards get them alive so that he can deal with them personally. But of course, they’re outsmarted along the way, leaving Moronicles and his trusty but dim musclebound servant Mongolox as the only survivors of the royal entourage…

Again, the Warren Publications and E.C. Comics spirit is alive and well in this latest issue of Shadows On The Grave. Corben plays things fairly straight here, delivering old school comic book chills with some fun twists and some quirky dark humor. If some of the endings are a little predictable, that’s fine – this is horror comic comfort food in a lot of ways and all the better for it. The artwork is beautiful in the way that Corben’s hyper detailed black and white work tends to be, often times very exaggerated by fitting in how it depicts the over the top storylines so well.